Dr. Josef Straub is Associate Director Companion Diagnostics (CDx) and Clini­cal Biomarkers (BM) at Merck KGaA. From 2009 to 2015 he was a Senior Biomarker Scientist Anti Integrin Therapies at Merck KGaA. From 2003 to 2009 he was a Head of Pharmacogenomics R&D at OncoMethylome Sciences. From 2002 - 2003 he was a successful Freelance Consultant. He was a Labo­ratory Head in Toxicogenomics at the BAYER AG from 2001 to 2002. From 1997 to 2001 he was a GSK Junior Research Fellow in Genomics at Hertford College, Oxford/UK. Dr. Josef Straub is a biomedical scientist with a solid background in oncology, human genetics and toxicology. His current profes­sional focus is on the implementation of state of the art clinical development with an emphasis on personalised medicine. He has hands on experience in medical device regulatory interactions (FDA and EMA regulation) and the implementation of patient stratification in clinical trials. His broad scientific background in life sciences is a major pre-requisite for being able to identify the biomarkers required for personalised medicine strategies. In professional life Dr. Josef Straub accepted several roles in various organisational structures including independent consultancy, research in academic labs, research and development in a small to medium sized biotech company, as well research and development in global German pharma companies. Dr. Josef Straub has created and successfully led teams of varying sizes in cross-cultural and also cross-national settings.

Liz joined AstraZeneca in 2011 and is the UK head of Translation Science for oncology. During the past 5 years her department has led the development and execution of proof of mechansim, proof of principle and personalized healthcare biomarker strategies for over 20 programs from lead optimization to life cycle management. Areas of research focus include DNA damage and repair, PI3K/AKT/mTOR, RTK, Ras signaling,anti-hormonal therapries and im­mune oncology. She has over 25 years of oncology experience including a 15 year career in the pharmaceutical industry. Liz formerly led the Oncology Signaling group and the target validation / lead identification teams at Merck Research Labs in Boston. During her career at Merck Liz led translational sci­ence initiatives for multiple programs including Zolinza (HDAC inhibitor) and MK-8033 (c-Met inhibitor). Prior to joining Merck Liz served as the biology program lead for several kinase programs including VX-680 (Aurora kinase inhibitor) at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in the UK. Liz began her career with a BA in biology from Oxford University. She obtained her PhD in oncology at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) where she studied the molecular regulation of apoptosis in Gerard Evan’s lab. She then con­ducted postdoctoral studies focused on cell cycle regulation and DNA damage response in Ed Harlow’s lab (MGH Cancer Centre / Harvard Medical School).

Isabelle Naëije has a Master in Sciences degree in bio-engineering (Free Uni­versity of Brussels, Belgium). Her PhD thesis was devoted to the study of the protein MxiC in the regulation of the type III secretion system of Shigella flexneri. She is currently based in Basel, Switzerland. She is the Clinical Trial Head in charge of a Phase I-II study in the field of Renal Cell Carcinoma spon­sored by Novartis, in collaboration with Merck. Before taking this role, she worked during 5 years at Actelion Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Switzerland as Project Manager in the Clinical Pharmacology department. She moved to Switzerland in 2011 after 5 years spent as Global Study Manager at Glaxo SmithKline Bio­logicals, Belgium. Prior to moving to the pharmaceutical industry, she worked as on-site clinical Research Assistant at the Erasmus University Hospital, Bel­gium. In 2014, she became a certified Project Management Professional from the Project Management Institute (PMI). Since summer 2015, she actively contributes in the development of the PMI in France by organizing confer­ences and seminars on project management topics, in alignment with the PMI philosophy, in Mulhouse’s area.

Paul has over 20 years of clinical development experience having worked at GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis. In his current role as Glob­al Head Rare Disease Clinical Development at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED), he leads a group which provides dedicated and expert leadership to the design, implementation and execution of rare disease development programs. They support the Roche collective mission to deliver medicines with a transformative therapeutic impact to patients with rare disor­ders through clinical trial innovation and smart operational execution.

Francois-Pierre Martin, PhD, is senior project leader and principal investigator at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences, Lausanne, Switzerland. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and metabonomics from Imperial College London, UK in 2006, and has a background in biotechnology and microbiology from the engineering school Polytech-Marseille, France. From 2006 to 2012, Fran­çois-Pierre had contributed to the extension of the fields of metabonomics to nutrition and gut microbiota research for health and disease management at the Nestlé Research Center, Switzerland. His main research interests include gastrointestinal health, metabolic health, and the study of the underlying mechanisms of action of bioactives in paediatric and adult populations. This research helps in identifying new targets for nutraceutical and therapeutical applications. Dr. Martin is author of multiple research papers published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, books and patents.

Dr. Dollins received her PhD in Genetics and Genomics from Duke University Medical Center, after which she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Dollins subsequently joined the US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radio­logical Health as a senior reviewer and subsequently as acting branch chief, gaining experience in the regulatory review practices and policies that govern in vitro diagnostic and companion diagnostic regulatory review. Upon leaving FDA, Dr. Dollins joined Merck KGaA as the Associate Director of Regulatory Affairs, Companion Diagnostics.

Dr. Albitar has served as Chief Medical Officer and Director of Research and Development since 2012. Prior to NeoGenomics, Dr. Albitar served as the Medical Director of Hematopathology and Oncology and Chief of R&D for Hematopathology and Oncology, Quest Diagnostics. Prior to joining Quest Di­agnostics, Dr. Albitar held various faculty positions at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and rose to the position of tenured Full Professor in the Departments of Leukemia and Laboratory Medicine/Pathology. He held the position of Director of Molecular Laboratory and Leukemia Section at MD Anderson Cancer Center at the time of leaving MD Anderson. Dr. Albitar was trained in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at Brown University in Providence, RI and in Hematopathology at the University of Pennsylvania. He did his post-doctoral training in Genetics at the Genetic Department of Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Albitar received his medical degree from Damascus Medical School in Damascus, Syria.

Ralf Hoffmann (male) is Principal at Philips Research in Eindhoven, The Neth­erlands. He holds a PhD in Protein Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and an MSc in Biology from the University of Constance, Germany. After his time as a Postdoc at the University of Constance and at the University Hospital in Ulm, Germany, he moved to Sandoz Pharma, Basel, Switzerland to analyse the function and regulation of phosphodiesterases in inflammatory processes associated with asthma. After the merger between Sandoz Pharma and Ciba Geigy, he was working on target discovery for therapeutic applications in the field of Neuroscience. In 1998, Ralf left Novartis to build and lead a team performing high-throughput discovery of therapeutic targets for neurologi­cal diseases at Biofrontera Pharmaceuticals, Leverkusen, a German biotech start-up. He became a Director of Technology development and took over responsibility to develop a high-throughput expression data analysis platform to automatically analyse large-scale qPCR data for quality aspects and disease relevant gene expression signatures. In 2003, he joined Philips Research in Germany, as a Principal Scientist responsible for the development of opportu­nities in the area of Molecular Diagnostics and Molecular Imaging. In 2004, he moved to Philips Research in Eindhoven to establish a project aiming at the identification of novel biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer diseases, in particular prostate cancer. As a PI of the prostate cancer bio­marker activity at Philips, he was responsible for a number of external clinical and academic prostate cancer related collaborations on the European level. He was appointed honorary Senior Lecturer (Associated Professor) at Glasgow University in 2009 due to his substantial role in supervision of several Philips- BBSRC funded PhD students.

Dr Nadia Anwar joined Oracle to take care of the Translational Research and Precision Medicine offerings within Oracle’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Global Business Unit. Dr Anwar has been a career bioinformatician in both academia and industry and eventually moved into consulting, developing a small bioinformatics consultancy company focusing on data integration. Dr Anwar previously co-ordintaed the Biopax pathway standard development, culminating in the release of the level 3 standard in 2011. She has devel­oped integration solutions from warehoused, federated, semantic and now big data; she focuses on making sure that solutions fit the data rather then forcing data into solutions.

Dr. Brian Burke is the Head of Commercial Business Management at Hori­zon Discovery. After gaining his PhD from the University of Leeds, Brian has worked extensively in commercial innovation, with a particular emphasis on the fields of NGS and gene editing. During his time at Horizon he has focused very much on the importance of applying reference standards to improve molecular testing across different diagnostic platforms

Patrick Descombes is the head of Functional Genomics at the Nestle Institute of Health Sciences (NIHS), located in Lausanne Switzerland. His responsibili­ties in this role include supporting, managing and executing projects involv­ing genomics at NIHS and across the Nestle R&D. The cutting-edge genom­ics technologies routinely used include Next Generation Sequencing, Third Generation Sequencing and microarrays for discovery, and real-time PCR and nanoString nCounter for validation. The major applications cover transcrip­tomics, genotyping, DNA (re)sequencing, miRNA, ChIP, epigenetics. Prior to joining NIHS, Dr. Descombes did set up and managed for ten years the Ge­nomics Platform of the University of Geneva. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Geneva.

Fabrice Chimienti, PhD, is project leader and Associate Principal Scientist at AstraZeneca Gothenburg, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. in cell and molecu­lar biology from Université Descartes Paris V, Paris, France in 2001. He has a strong background in beta cell biology and metabolic diseases. After he identified and characterized the diabetes-susceptible gene SLC30A8, Fabrice was co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of a biotech company developing personalized therapeutics for type 2 diabetes and imaging agents for in vivo evaluation of functional beta cell mass. Fabrice joined joined AstraZeneca in 2014, where he provides scientific leadership on pancreatic islets cells and metabolic diseases. His research interests include metabolic health, study of the underlying mechanisms of beta cell failure and validation of new tar­gets/biomarkers using phenotypic screens. Dr. Chimienti authored multiple research papers published in peer-reviewed high impact journals and patents.

Prior to transferring to Europe in July 2015, Andrew was IBM’s Life Sciences Leader for China where he worked with a number of leading multi-national companies. He also worked with China’s leading Life Sciences companies, each a leader in their respective segment. Andrew helps his clients address the industry imperatives of improving the clinical development process, act on insights to increase sales, and enhance relationships across the ecosystem with business model transformation. Prior to joining IBM in 2000, Andrew had a successful 14-year career with a leading strategy consulting company. Andrew graduated from Melbourne University with a Bachelor of Arts, and Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) with a Bachelor of Business. He has a Masters of Business Administration from the International University of Ja­pan and is a Fellow of the Financial Services Institute of Australasia.

A.R. Thierry is Director of Research at the INSERM in the Institute of Research of Cancerology of Montpellier, France. His research interest focuses on the study of the diagnostic capacity of circulating DNA and the development of methods towards supporting personalised medicine. A.R. Thierry has coor­dinated a prospective blinded multicentric studies showing the first clinical validation and demonstration of clinical utility of the plasma DNA analysis in oncology, by detecting point mutations in KRAS and BRAF from colorectal patients. He is one of the world leaders in the clinical application of the analy­sis of circulating DNA and now he is directing various studies on prognosis, cancer patient follow up and cancer screening. He is the principal founder of DiaDx, a Biotech company devoted to liquid biopsy solutions in oncology.

Dr Xosé M Fernández is a genomicist with over 20 years´ experience in mo­lecular biology and bioinformatics. Currently he is playing a leading role in a number of projects delivering innovative bioinformatics across a wide spec­trum of applications in EMEA for Thermo Fisher Scientific.Further to this, Dr Fernández has provided expert review and technical advice to genomics and bioinformatics projects globally (numerous European consortia, consulting for numerous pharma companies and as advisor to Genome Canada) prior to join the company in January 2013. He has been pivotal in establishing partner­ships with healthcare science professional bodies in the UK and beyond to successfully influence the expansion of continuing professional development programmes to incorporate bioinformatics.

Manfred Dietel (*10.09.48) is currently Medical Director of the Institute of Pathology and former Head of the Board of Directors at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany. He previously served as Dean of the Medical Faculty at Charité. Before this, Prof. Dietel was the Director of the Institute of Pathology at the University of Kiel, Germany. He received his medical educa­tion from the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he was promoted to As­sistant Professor and also served as a full Professor of anatomical and surgical pathology. Professor Dietel’s scientific interests include in vitro cell growth of benign and malignant tumours of gastrointestinal, breast/ovarian and mes­enchymal origin, prognosis of ovarian tumours, and molecular mechanisms of cytostatic drug resistance. In the diagnostic field of surgical pathology he is working on molecular tumour pathology, predictive biomarkers and telepa­thology. Methods of interest are cell culture, immunohistochemistry, in-situ hybridisation, PCR, multi-gene assays, next generation sequencing and telecommunication in diagnostic and scientific pathology. Professor Dietel is on the editorial board of several scientific journals and the editorial board of the WHO Classification of Tumours series: Pathology and Genetics of Gynaeco­logical Tumours. He was president of several congresses (European Society of Pathology, ) and head of the annual meeting of the German Society of Senol­ogy (2001). He is a member of several national and international scientific societies including the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), the European Society of Pathology (ESP), and the German Society of Pathology (DGP), where he is the Past-President. He is member of the Leopoldina - Ger­man National Academy of Science. 

Gunther Jansen, PhD is Scientific Director, Business Development Pharma at Molecular Health in Heidelberg, Germany. He holds a PhD in genetics from the University of Helsinki in Finland, and studied biology and philosophy of science at the University of Ghent in Belgium. He was research group leader at the University of Kiel in Germany specializing in the genomics of antibiotic resistance and cancer chemotherapy resistance, and was a Fellow at the In­stitute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. He is an expert in precision medicine, bioinformatics, genomics, and molecular biology of disease.

Dr Lelouvier received his Ph.D in Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology from the University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI, France, in 2007. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (USA), he joined Vaiomer in 2012. As cellular and molecular biology group leader and head of biomark­ers discovery, he developed with his group the molecular tools (16S qPCR and 16S metagenomics sequencing) to study specifically the blood and tissue microbiomes, before becoming Chief Scientific Officer of Vaiomer in 2016. The study of tissue and blood microbiota allows Vaiomer to link intestinal dysbiosis and tissular inflammation for the development of biomarkers and therapeutics in the fields of cardiometabolic diseases, neurodegenerative disorders and chronic infection.